So with the cool gameplay in singleplayer, that has horse riding, train robberies and loads of gun totin’ action of the Wild West, you need some pretty good graphics. Thankfully the game doesn’t let you down in this department, it’s not the most amazing graphics engine ever but it’s certainly not half bad.

The environments are great; they capture the feel of the old west perfectly and are riddled with places to have a good shoot out. The textures have a gritty feeling to them and the design of the characters, places, objects are all well done. The weapons look and most importantly seem to be based on proper designs of that time too.

It has some great special effects and some good fire effects, especially since the game allows you to use fire as something more than just set dressing. It works nicely with the physics and delivers a cool gameplay edge to the title.

The animations are also an area of the game where there’s a lot of detail, the death animations and the gunfights are brutal at times.

It isn’t just a single player game either it’s got a fast paced multi-player feature that has Deathmatch, Skirmish and Robbery modes – Robbery being CTF (Capture the Flag) – not much invention there, but the game has no lag and it’s highly addictive in these modes. I always did love a Quake-em-up.

When the MP game loads really fast and delivers this much gameplay it’s something pretty good, even though it’s vanilla compared to a lot of more innovative MP style games – if it’s not broken, don’t fix it. The map design for MP will allow you to relive some of the cooler Spaghetti Western moments and extends the life of the game beyond the cool SP story.

All in all it’s a game that I liked, but with all the good has to come a bit of bad. I didn’t really like the way you learn stealth with Billy, I felt the controls were a bit restrictive and the environments you start out in, the same. It looks nice but it doesn’t push the boundaries of graphics and it can get a bit annoying with the narration between levels. And it did crash to the desktop a couple of times, for the most part the gameplay was silky-smooth but again there were a few moments where it jerked and I noticed a frame loss.

I liked the voice acting for the most part with some great work from the Rev and Billy, but some of the voices I felt were a little bit dry and they weren’t as good as they could have been. I also liked the music, the music had just the right twang for the genre and the sound effects were likewise of good quality, they had the six-shooter ‘bangs’ down to a ‘T’.

If you like these kinds of games and you’re looking for a proper gritty Wild West genre shooter then you can consider your prayers answered with the Call of Juarez, it’s a solid title that builds on solid shooter traditions and adds some nice touches and revamps of things like bullet time, it’s worth checking out.